Let's talk about gluten
Co-founder Claire here to reassure anyone who is concerned about the role of gluten in our chocolates, especially in our chocolate selection boxes both ongoing & for Christmas. All bar 3 of our flavours do NOT contain gluten in their recipes, so it is very easy to avoid it in any of our selections if you dont want to eat a chocolate which contains it.
The 3 flavours which do are all made with our vegan-friendly caramel and we make this caramel with Oatly's whippable oat cream rather than normal dairy cream, for obvious reasons. Oatly cannot give a 100% guarantee that the oats they use are gluten-free, so to be on the safe side, we are saying that these 3 flavours do contain it. If they do, the amount will be very low but we are being super careful!
The 3 vegan-friendly flavours which include our oat cream-based caramel are:
- Speculaas Caramel - winner of a 2 Star Gold Great Taste Award in 2022. This dark chocolate gem has a single naturally coloured pink decorative dot in the middle. This is the same caramel as in our Speculaas Caramel stars too.
- Chilli Tickle Caramel - winner of a Bronze Academy of Chocolate Award in 2021. This dark chocolate gem has 3 naturally coloured yellow decorative spots on it.
- Sticky Toffee Pudding - as yet to be entered into any awards! This dark chocolate dome is decorated with a swirl of natural yellow colouring and yellow dots.
We do make it clear in all our menus, whether in words or graphic icons, that these 3 chocolates contain gluten so it is very easy to avoid them if you come across them in a selection box. 2 of these flavours feature in our Classic Advent Box, at least 1 are in each of our Large & Medium Festive Collection Boxes (but are not in our Small Festive Collection boxes) and, of course they all appear in both our Vegan Advent & Vegan Festive Collection Boxes.
We are not currently including any of these flavours in our ongoing Chococo fresh selection boxes but they do sometimes feature in the Dark & Alcohol-free medium selection boxes, so please do check the icons and contents information for those items.
The only other items we make currently which contain gluten are our chocolate biscuit cakes and bakery items, including our brownies by post.
You may also have spotted that we are now working with a 43% Colombia origin oat m!lk chocolate. This is made with gluten-free oat powder, so this chocolate is great for anyone who wants to avoid dairy, gluten, soya or nuts!
Finally, I need to flag that as you are no doubt aware, that as we do work with gluten and we don't have totally separate making areas, whilst we do our best to avoid any cross contamination, we cannot guarantee that our products will be 100% free from any particular allergen. We are not a free-from brand as we do work with dairy, nuts & gluten to make our handcrafted & handpacked creations, so please be aware that there might be traces.